


Dangerous Road

by Sarren



Category: Strange Empire (TV)
Genre: Canon Trans Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 15:54:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5462387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarren/pseuds/Sarren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Morgan remembers a talk with his uncle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dangerous Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bold_seer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/gifts).



> Many thanks to my excellent beta reader, Brigdh.

_“You think you and her are? Natural, I mean.”_

Morgan freezes at the sly tone in Miss Logan’s voice. He’s always been so careful not to draw attention to himself. And then he’d set eyes on Rebecca Lively and his heart felt like it stopped in his chest. He’s drawn to her; it feels inevitable, like, even though he knows that discovery will be the ruin of him.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was an unseasonably hot fall day, the sort of prickly heat that made clothes chafe against the skin, jackets and vest discarded in a pile, shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow. Pike had a good sized trout hooked on the line, flapping and splashing. His face split in a giant grin as he hauled on the line and Morgan laughed in pure joy to see his uncle looking so carefree, the lines that hardship and loss had put there smoothed for once from his brow.

The line snagged on something underwater, and the fish still fought mightily. Morgan wasn’t about to let it get away; they couldn’t afford to let a prize like that escape, not with winter closing in. What they didn’t eat that evening they’d salt and store away for when the snows came and the river froze over.

Morgan set his own rod down carefully. He shucked off his boots and pants without a thought and waded into the water, the current strong enough that it tugged and pulled against his thighs. He unhooked the line from the submerged branch and held it up, triumphant. His smile died at the grave expression on his uncle’s face.

“Put your clothes on, boy,” Pike said, and his voice was harsh. Confused by his uncle’s tone, and embarrassed also, though he could not have said why, Morgan waded back to the river bank. He gave the fish into Pike’s hand, outstretched to receive it, then pulled his pants on over legs still dripping water. He reached for his vest and tugged it on hurriedly, doing up the buttons with wet, fumbling fingers.

“About time you put aside the pants,” Pike said gruffly, busying himself unhooking the still flapping fish. He wasn’t looking at Morgan.

Morgan didn’t understand at first. Pike had just told him to put them on… He looked at his uncle’s averted eyes, the pink at the tips of his ears that happened when Pike was uncomfortable, or embarrassed, and his throat closed in denial.

“No,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t speak past the constriction. He coughed and tried for a deep breath. His chest hurt, inside. “No,” he said again – firmly, he hoped.

“Your ma’s petticoats are in the trunk in the roof,” Pike said.

Morgan knew that. He went up there now and then, when his uncle was out, when he wanted to feel close to her. He’d stroke the fine cotton of the petticoats and bury his face in the cloth of her best dress, imagining he could still smell the rose water fragrance of her that was one of the few memories that remained to him.

“Looks like they’ll about fit you now,” his uncle plowed on. He looked up at Morgan finally, and Morgan saw him flinch. Morgan wondered what his own face looked like that put that dismayed expression on Pike’s.

“Why?” he croaked.

Pike sighed. “You ain’t a boy anymore,” he said heavily.

“I know that,” Morgan said. He’d turned sixteen just last month, in fact. Pike had bought him a new fishing rod, ordered it special from the city. Today had been the first opportunity they’d had to go fishing. He’d been so excited to try it out. “I’m a man,” he wanted to say, but it sounded ridiculous, now, even to himself.

“You’re all growed up now,” Pike said. “Time you were looking to find yourself a husband, a family of your own—”

“No!” Morgan bit his lip to stop himself from saying anything more, afraid he hadn’t the self-possession not to shout, or worse, to cry.

He’d always known, hadn’t he, that someday it’d be expected of him. He’d put it firmly out of his head, hoping, stupidly, that day was far away. The thought of it, the thought of putting on skirts, laying down for a man, being expected to be a dutiful wife, it scared him, scared him bad.

He clenched his fists to try to stop his hands shaking.

‘You are my family,” he croaked.

“You don’t want to be stuck with me, working at the station for the rest of your life.”

“Yes, I do!”

“It’s no life for a—”

“Don’t say it!” Morgan said, and he was on his feet, his clenched fists pressed to his temples.

And his uncle was looking up at him, all consternation. “Sit down, boy,” Pike said soothingly, his voice gentle like Morgan was an injured animal.

Morgan’s legs folded under him and he found himself on the ground, rocking as he bit his lip again till he tasted blood, blood in his mouth because it was better than crying, crying like a girl and not the man he wanted to be.

His uncle’s large hands closed around his fists and gently pulled them from his face and held them, clasped in his own. “Talk to me,” he said, his voice still gentle, but it was an order, and Morgan didn’t disobey his uncle.

Morgan took a deep, sobbing breath. “I ain’t a girl,” he said, at a loss as to how he could make Pike understand when he didn’t rightly understand it himself.

“You’re confused,” Pike said. “Your ma and me, we thought it’d be easier - you were just a young’un when you came to live with me - with the chores that needed doing, and the mining camp just up the road,” he said, his voice grim, and Morgan didn’t need him to explain.

“I ain’t confused, not about this.”

Pike sighed. “I let it go on too long, I guess.”

Morgan tried to pull his hands away, but his uncle only pulled him closer, pulled him into a hug, and Morgan was stiff against him, because they didn’t do that - Morgan couldn’t remember the last time he’d been hugged, and then suddenly he did, his mother’s soft arms around him, the smell of roses, and the resistance went out of him. He sagged against his uncle’s broad chest and cried as he hadn’t since he was a babe.

He cried until his head ached and his eyes were swollen and aching; he cried for his mother, dead of pneumonia some ten years since and he cried for himself, for the end of his life, it felt like, because he wouldn’t be himself anymore if Pike made him… made him…

“I ain’t a girl,” he said against Pike’s chest. His uncle made some soothing noise, hugged him tighter, but Morgan felt trapped of a sudden and pulled away, relieved Pike let him go. He turned his face away, scrubbed at it with his sleeve, the cotton rough on the hot, tender skin under his eyes.

His uncle was watching him, he knew, and he was grateful that Pike let him be. When he was sure he could talk without his voice shaking, he took a deep breath and looked up. Sure enough, Pike was just sitting, watching him, but there was no disapproval in his face, no censure. Just patience in his kind eyes.

“I ain’t a girl,” he insisted, his voice growing stronger, certain. “I don’t know what I am, but I ain’t made to wear to dresses, or to marry a man.”

He didn’t really expect Pike to believe him. So he hardly dared hope, when his uncle didn’t say anything immediately. Pike looked at Morgan for a long time. Morgan swallowed hard and met his eyes. No point trying to argue anymore; either Pike would trust he knew his own mind or he wouldn’t. Pike was a man of great deliberation. He took time to come to his decisions; he couldn’t be hurried.

“I wish you could’a known your aunt,” Pike said eventually, and Morgan blinked, confused. Pike’s wife had died before Morgan and his ma came to live with them, and after his ma died too the next winter it’d just been the two of them, holed up against the bitter weather, left to comfort each other as best as they were able, their grief binding them together, making them family for real. Pike hadn’t known what to do with a little girl. At first the boy’s attire had been for practicality, for chores and for going into town in the spring, where Pike had introduced him as his nephew. But eventually, without either of them even noticing, it’d become natural-like, and Morgan had sometimes wondered if his uncle even remembered the girl Morgan had once been. The girl Morgan only remembered when he wrapped the cotton bindings around his breasts when he had to make the trip to town.

“I would’ve liked that.”

“Mary told me something of the customs of her people, the Ojibwe,” he said. “She told me that there were some – not many – but a few, that they called _Niizh Manidoowag,_ which means two-spirited in the Ojibwe tongue. Those who were born male but lived as women, and even women who were warriors, who took wives. They were respected amongst the tribe.”

Morgan stared at him. There were others like him? Was it possible he wasn’t the freak he had believed himself to be?

Pike scratched at the whiskers on his cheek. “I admit, it’s occurred to me a time or two to wonder if you might not be like them, two-spirited,” he admitted.

“It has?”

Pike’s eyes crinkled and he smiled, just a twitch at the corners of his mouth. “Mostly when I’ve seen the way you look at the whores.”

“I don’t look,” Morgan protested, but felt the blush that betrayed him hot on his face. Of course he’d looked, all the boys did; he’d be more like to draw attention to himself if he didn’t look. He had a notion that weren’t Pike’s meaning though, and that his protest had only confirmed his uncle’s suspicion.

His uncle wasn’t looking at him disapprovingly, or with the disgust that Morgan had dreaded.

“You don’t mind?” Morgan asked, hesitantly, hardly able to credit it.

“Why would I?”

“’Cause it ain’t natural, that’s why.”

His uncle made a dismissive noise. “Who’s to say what’s natural anyway?”

“God?” Morgan had read his bible. The bible had plenty to say on what Man could and couldn’t do, and he hadn’t found it very comforting. 

“You remember that preacher that came through the camp two summers ago?”

“I guess.” Mostly Morgan remembered the fire and brimstone of the man. He’d avoided him except to go to service.

“He had a lot to say about the infallibility of God.”

“So?”

“Do _you_ think God makes mistakes?”

Morgan wanted nothing more than to believe what Pike was telling him. That he wasn’t made wrong, after all. That he didn’t have nothing to feel shamed about.

“I’m not sure the preacher would see things in that light.”

Pike sighed again. “God may be infallible, but Man for sure ain’t,” he said grimly. “You want to choose this way to live, I ain’t gonna say you can’t. But you got to be careful. People find out, they ain’t gonna understand and they sure as heck ain’t gonna forgive. It’s a dangerous road you’ll be walking, Morgan Finn.”

Morgan knew that, of course he did. But having his uncle say it out loud made it real. Made fear shiver through him.

Pike heaved himself to his feet and held out a hand to pull Morgan up. “Time we was heading back,” he said, and Morgan noted for the first time the long shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. He wiped his face once more on the sleeve and nodded. Pike seemed to hesitate, but then he put a reassuring arm around Morgan’s shoulders and squeezed for a moment, then let go. “Let’s go home, boy,” he said, and a weight Morgan hadn’t realised he carried vanished at the acceptance in that one word. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

_“You think you and her are? Natural, I mean.”_

Her remark is a knife to the stomach, a timely reminder that other people aren’t as understanding as his uncle. Morgan clenches his fists and then forces himself to relax, to not give himself away. Miss Logan seems like a decent woman; perhaps she doesn’t mean anything much by her words. He can’t take the chance though. It’s not just himself he’s putting at risk, Rebecca will be ruined too if people find out about him… about them. With as nonchalant an air as he can muster, Morgan tips his hat to Miss Logan and walks away, head high.


End file.
